Warlords II Scenario Review

OZ.ZIP 143,580 bytes.  This is eastern Australia and New Zealand, *NOT* The
Land of Oz like you might expect from the name!  5 players, 60 cities, 27
ruins.  Author: Michael Thompson.

Rating summary, scale of 1 to 10:
Wt Area          Score Comments
10 Army set          5 (almost identical to the default armies)
 7 Map design        6 (mostly water but fairly well designed otherwise)
 5 Army pics         4 (rather crude, as he admits, but passable)
 5 City pics         4 (Hoggs city set unchanged - not great)
 3 Background info   2 (very small info file included)
 2 Cities/ruins      8 (completely named and described but *many* typos)
 2 Items/heroes      3 (half new items, a few heroes, the rest don't fit)
   OVERALL RATING  153

This is a tolerable scenario with no outstanding features either good
or bad.  The army capabilities are essentially the default army set with
the names changed.  (Catapult becomes Wombat, Dragon becomes Bunyip,
etc.)  It's a usable army set but has all the deficiencies of the default
set.  The pictures aren't very good (he said in his notes "I'm a dreadful
drawer" and I agree) but you can get used to them after a while.  You'll
never get so used to them that you like them.

The city set is the Hoggs cities from the scenario builder, unchanged,
and I suppose they do ok for Australian ranches, but they sure are
boring.  At least he had the sense not to try to create his own city
set.

The map is fairly good, although I would have squeezed New Zealand
closer to Australia in order to allow more actual land area on the map,
instead of so much ocean.  I appreciate his taking the time and trouble
to name and describe every city and every ruin and I've given him high
points on this minor category.  It would have been a perfect score if he
had gone back and proofread it to fix the many many typos.

Half the items are helms and swords, most of the hero names are dwarves
and elves and shale-spitting giants, so the flavor of "Australia" that
he intended for this scenario competes with medieval european fantasy.

Try it if you're realy dying to play an Australia scenario, otherwise
you'd probably be better off playing one of the many better scenarios.
Not too bad for his first attempt, but first attempts should usually be
thrown away.

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This review is copyrighted by myself, but may be distributed in any
UNMODIFIED form as long as NO CHARGE is made for distribution (such
as a per-minute charge for online time) and it is not included in any
copyrighted "compilation" (such as claimed by certain online services
I will not name).  Dirk Pellett